PRESS RELEASE
Monday 12 February
Wysing Arts Centre 2018 Residencies: artists announced for new residency model
Throughout 2018 Wysing Arts Centre will host artists in-residence, who will be working across a range of practices to develop new work within an atmosphere of collaboration, addressing issues such as disability rights, race and racism, and gender, identity and sexuality. The residencies will be a new way of working for and at Wysing, with over 40 international artists supported across the year.
It will also be the first time a model of residency in this shape and form has been tried in the UK. Most of the artists have been selected from applications received through an Open Call that was announced in Autumn 2017, and in which artists were invited to tell Wysing when they would like to be in-residence and for how long. In response, the artists selected will be working at Wysing over multiple visits across the year, many bringing an existing group or peer network with them, and others who will be using the opportunity to convene a new group. Artists and their children will also be hosted.
The selected artists work across a range of media and disciplines including visual art, writing, choreography, dance, music and sound and the artists will be travelling to Wysing are from the UK, Europe, the USA and Australia.
The artists will have access to Wysing’s extensive facilities that include an onsite 17th century farmhouse, a range of studios, a ceramics studio and - for the first time - a music recording studio. A series of public events related to residencies will take place across the year.
Artists selected are:
- Camae Ayewa, aka Moor Mother, will be in-residence ahead of Wysing’s 2018 music festival at which she will be performing.
- Leah Clements and collaborators Rebecca Bligh, Uma Breakdown, Elena Colman, Alice Hattrick and Lizzy Rose will form a new network of art practitioners who identify as ‘crip’, disabled, or otherwise non-conforming to standard ideas of good health.
- Phoebe Collings James and Last Yearz Interesting Negro/ Jamila Johnson-Small will create a collaborative work embodied through a symbiotic relationship between dance, music and sculpture, asking what an anti-assimilationist practice might look and sound like in 2018.
- Brandon Covington Sam-Sumana, aka N-Prolenta, will produce a monograph that will incorporate fifteen short essays
- Julia Crabtree & William Evans, previous residency artists returning to Wysing to work with invited collaborators to expand upon key themes from recent research including botany, fungal ecologies, co-evolving, feminist sci-fi, bodies and critters.
- Formerly Called (Ibrahim Cissé , Atum Farah, Cédric Fauq, Georgia Lucas-Going, Elijah Maja, Olu Ogunnaike, Cindy Sissokho, Kefiloe Siwisa, Dominique White and others) will meet at Wysing across several retreats to reinforce their existing network of People of Colour.
- Anna McMahon and Salote Tawale will research and develop new UK networks, including accessing collections of Fijian cultural objects held in Cambridge University Museums and developing a podcast series through interviews on gender, race, post-colonial theory, queerness, family, and food.
- Joe Moran will work with dancers and dramaturges to develop a body of research traversing expanded choreography, discourse and form conceived in a spirit of urgency, collectivity and self-definition.
- Tessa Norton and family will be in-residence during which Norton will explore how the experience of parenthood has changed her perception of time, and the implications that this renewed perspective has for thinking about art.
- Nastja Säde Rönkkö and familywill be in-residence during which Rönkkö will be developing an ambitious new project to be realised in 2018.
- Rachael Rosen will be working with a small team of coders and performers, including Henry Rodrick, to develop a performance and playable archive for pOrtals; an ongoing collaborative world building and storytelling exercise.
- Sonic Cyberfeminisms (Annie Goh, Marlo De Lara, Jane Frances Dunlop, Natalie Hyacinth, Miranda Iossifidis, Frances Morgan, Shanti Suki Osman and Marie Thompson) will develop a series of podcasts, broadcasts and a zine.
- Liv Wynter will work with a script writer and stage hand to develop a new installation and performance piece.
NOTES TO EDITORS:
● For press information contact Nicola Jeffs – / 07794694754
● Artists are available for interview on request. Donna Lynas, Director, is available for interview on request.
● Twitter: @wysingartscentre I Facebook: Wysing Arts Centre I Instagram: @wysing_donna #wysingresidencies / www.wysingartscentre.org
● Wysing Arts Centre is just an hour from London.
● Through its innovative work, Wysing Arts Centre influences the development of the visual arts sector in the UK. As a respected and well-connected institution operating outside the usual gallery system and urban context, Wysing is uniquely positioned to develop programmes that provide opportunities for the exchange of knowledge and ideas, and which reflect on the role of art, artists, and arts organisations in society; acting as a testing ground for new ideas.
● Established in 1989, Wysing’s large site in rural Cambridgeshire has been significantly developed and encompasses artist studios, a large gallery, a music recording studio, educational and project spaces, onsite accommodation, ceramics facilities, outdoor space with sculpture, and a café.
Artist Biographies:
Camae Ayewa is a musician performing under the name Moor Mother and whose 2016 album Fetish Bones was conceived as a form of protest, and as form of time travel; a collection of sounds that are events themselves, telling stories rich in history about the journey that brings us to today and the future we are creating. Ayewa has toured in Europe and the U.S. at numerous festivals, colleges and universities sharing the stage with King Britt, Islam Chipsy, Claudia Rankine and Bell Hooks. As a soundscape artist she has had work featured at Samek Art Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art Chicago, and Everson Museum of Art. Ayewa is also a renowned poet and author of the forthcoming poetry book, also named Fetish Bones, and a member of Black Quantum Futurism, A Collective which has recently released its first book, Black Quantum Futurism theory and practice Vol. 1. BQF has presented in Copenhagen Perspectives on Time Conference, Ferguson is the Future at Yale and Afrofuturism Now festival in Holland. Ayewa is a 2016 Leeway Award recipient and 2016 Blade of Grass Fellow. She will have a solo exhibition at New York’s The Kitchen in autumn 2018.
Leah Clements is an artist based in London. Her practice is concerned with emotional experiences, the relationship between the psychological and the physical, and instances of self-loss into other people or worlds. Self/other boundaries and collective identities, the subconscious, and the impact of emotion on the body have been explored through collapse (prelude) at Muddy Yard (2017), we felt the presence of someone else at Jupiter Woods (2016), Beside Chisenhale Gallery Online Commission (2016), Beside at Chisenhale Gallery (2015), You Promised Me Poems, Vitrine (2015), and The Empath Project at Res. She is an artist in residence at space, London on the Art + Technology programme where she has been working on a VR game titled sick bed, and will be an artist in residence at Rupert, Vilnius in June 2018.
Phoebe Collings James is a Jamaican British artist, born in London and living in New York. Her practice is intentionally messy and sprawling, focused on how we live with getting bodied. Her works take form in drawing, video, sculpture, text and music, with a distinctly corporeal approach. She burdens ubiquitous materials with a process of symbolic layering, all in order to explore emotional connections to the politics and erotics of violence, language and fear. Phoebe’s work has been exhibited internationally - exhibitions include Harlem Postcards, Studio Museum Harlem, ATROPHILIA, Company Gallery, New York, Just Enough Violence, Arcadia Missa, London, Choke on your Tongue, Artuner at ICI, London, The Flesh Is All You Have If You Mortify That There Is No Hope For You, Ritter Zamet Gallery, London and Blood on the Leaves Blood on the Roots, Preteen Gallery, Mexico City.
Last Yearz Interesting Negro/Jamila Johnson-Small makes shows that work with in-between spaces, syncopation, trance states, internal narratives, intensities, electronic music, and small dances to affect/disrupt/deflect/distort/reflect gaze(s) directed towards her body. Resultant choreographies are stage/dreamspace/battleground, working through questions of presence, visibility, responsibility and pleasure, building atmospheric landscapes through the live unfolding of the tensions between things that produce meaning. She uses things that are already there, rearranging them in an effort to encounter combinations that resonate with the horror, discomfort, cringe, confusion and sensuality of this contemporary moment. Of Caribbean descent, born and based in London she has formed long term collaborations with other artists including Project O with Alexandrina Hemsley, immigrants and animals with Mira Kautto. More recently she performs in work by Fernanda Munoz-Newsome, runs HOTLINE with Sara Sassanelli, and GUSH with David Panos, a semi-regular low-key DIY event.
Multimedia artist and producer Brandon Covington Sam-Sumana, also known as N-Prolenta, works to interrogate matters related to currency, transience, narrative structure, and system metabolism. Covington's interrogations have spawned music projects, objects of generative design, forays into speculative finance, video, and visual art. They were recently commissioned by Rhizome and the New Museum for First Look: New Black Portraitures, an online exhibition interrogating the genre of portraiture in relationship to Blackness, exploring the complexities and violence endemic to this territory.
Julia Crabtree & William Evans primarily work as maker exploring materiality and embodiment through sculpture, print and film. Recent commissions include Gullet at Cell Project Space, ‘Crutch’ exhibited as part of Maximum Overdrive at Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea (2017), Gulch, Walter Phillips Gallery, Canada (2016), Antonio Bay, South London Gallery (2014) and Hyper Bole Legion TV, London (2014). They were recipients of the Nina Stewart Residency award at South London Gallery (2014), The Future Residency, at Wysing Art Centre, Cambridge (2014) and the Mary Hofsetter Legacy Scholarship for the New Materiality residency at Banff Centre, Canada (2016). They are currently Somerset House Studio Residents and have an upcoming solo show at Fluent, Santandar, Spain. Their residency has been supported with a Grant for the Arts from Arts Council England in partnership with Cell Project Space.
Formed as a working-group in 2016, Formerly Called was a project devised for the London branch of the Northern Winter Workshops, initiated by artists Dorine van Meel and Nelmarie du Preez with the support of curator Rachael Harlow, prefiguring the Southern Summer School – a public program which took place at BAK, Utrecht (17.02 – 24.02.2017). The Southern Summer School (SSS) / The Northern Winter Workshops (NWW) were collective projects that brought together art practitioners and cultural workers based in South Africa, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, around questions of decolonisation, art, and social justice. In order to address London’s local context Formerly Called was formed by curators and art producers Cédric Fauq and Ibrahim Cissé. They have held three meetings at the South London Gallery, which were semi-public events including People of Colour not only operating within the visual arts but also the fashion industry, music and design.
Anna McMahon currently lives and works in Sydney, Australia. Working site-specifically, McMahon's installations explore ways in which space can be prepared, occupied, contested, altered & changed over time. Using organic plant matter she re-examines through her own queer experience the architecture of significant moments in her life. McMahon is the recipient of the 2017 Parramatta City Council Creative Fellowship and 2016 Freedman Foundation Travelling Art Scholarship.
Salote Tawale currently lives and works in Sydney, Australia. Cultural identity is a central focus in her research. The inherent conflict of being from a mixed heritage (Fiji and Australia) that simultaneously includes, and excludes, Tawale from a dominant postcolonial narrative of contemporary Australia is a significant consideration in her practice. Tawale is the recipient of the 2017 Arts New South Wales Fellowship, and the 2016 Sainsbury Sculpture award that supported her residency at the Banff Center, Canada.
Joe Moran is a British-Irish choreographer with a wide-ranging practice incorporating touring theatre and gallery works, lecture-performance and curatorial projects. Artistic Director of Dance Art Foundation, through which his performance and curatorial work is produced, Joe is a Dance4 Associate Artist and Sadler’s Wells Summer University artist (2015-2018). He curated Dance Art Foundation’s recent two-year research programme Why Everyone Wants What We’ve Got (2015-2017) and organises the ongoing Dance Critical Theory Group. His most recent works On The Habit of Being Oneself, the solo Indefinite Article and Here and Not, a largescale film installation created in collaboration with Sam Williams, premiered at Sadler’s Wells in September 2017. Recent commissions and performances include at Sadler’s Wells, Whitechapel Gallery, New Art Gallery Walsall, Live Creations, a performance-based exhibition at Delfina Foundation, Block Universe/fig-2 at the ICA, a collaboration with sculptor Eva Rothschild, David Roberts Art Foundation (Frieze, 2014), Nottingham Contemporary, Assembly and The Modulated Body.
Tessa Norton works primarily with text and events, incorporating humour, theory and parody. Her work at Wysing will investigate the disruption to time experienced in early parenthood. Tessa Norton has previously given readings at The Tetley and Liverpool Biennial. Past projects and events include The Pure Ideology Personal Brand Workshop (Legion TV, London), Lustre Fabrics (Saltaire Arts Trail, Yorkshire), Award Machine (Grrr, London). Her writing has appeared in various publications including The Wire, Corridor 8, LAUGH, Hoax and Art Licks. She also works at Cecil Sharp House in London and is a board member at LUX artists film. She is based between London and West Yorkshire.
Nastja Säde Rönkkö who lives and works in Helsinki, Finland, works independently and in the collective LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner. Her work has been exhibited in numerous festivals, exhibitions and screenings. Rönkkö has exhibited and performed in major establishments and museums such as Sydney Opera House, Australia, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and FACT Foundation of Art and Technology, Liverpool, UK. Rönkkö’s residency has been supported by Frame Finland, HIAP and The Finnish Institute in London.